Finding supports ADVANCED SOCIAL COMMUNICATION MIDDLE SCHOOL: LESSON FOUR

Objective:  Students will identify ways that can help the successfully overcome obstacles

Social Emotional Learning Standards  Explain how family members, peers, school personnel, and community members can support school success and responsible behavior.  Identify strategies to make use of resources and overcome obstacles to achieve goals.  Evaluate the effects of requesting support from and providing support to others.  Generate alternative solutions and evaluate their consequences for a range of academic and social situations.

SCERTS Key Skills  Emotional awareness of self and others.  Engages in reciprocal interaction: sharing intentions, emotions, interests.  Responds to assistance, feedback and guidance regarding behavior/ emotional state.

Evidence Based Practices  Social narratives (SN): Narratives that describe social situations in some detail by highlighting relevant cues and offering examples of appropriate responding. Social narratives are individualized according to learner needs and typically are quite short, perhaps including pictures or other visual aids.  Visual support (VS): Any visual display that supports the learner engaging in a desired behavior or skills independent of prompts. Examples of visual supports include pictures, written words, objects within the environment, arrangement of the environment or visual boundaries, schedules, maps, labels, organization systems, and timelines.  Modeling (MD): Demonstration of a desired target behavior that results in imitation of the behavior by the learner and that leads to the acquisition of the imitated behavior. This EBP is often combined with other strategies such as prompting and reinforcement.

California Common Core Standards

Task One: Discussion  Questions:  Who helps you the most when you are faced with and obstacle or a problem?  If you ignore a problem, does it usually go away?  How comfortable are you asking for help with personal issues/problems?  Are you good at helping others when they may be facing an obstacle or having a problem?

Task Two: Where to find supports  In small groups, students will research the places to find supports for various issues. Group Topics include: Academic Issues: Problems with assignments, grades or understanding concepts being taught. Personal Issues: Family, Friends, self esteem School Issues: Teachers, schedules, coaches, classmates, bullies Health Issues: physical health, mental health, impact of identified disability

Task two: continued  Each group should brainstorm ideas of where to find supports for their focus area of need.  Groups should also google or interview others to try and find any additional ideas for supports.  Once the group has enough information as they feel is useful, they will document what each support is, where it can be accessed and give a brief description as to why and when it will be most appropriate to access.  There should be a minimum of FIVE supports for each area of need.

Task Three: Poster, Pamphlet, or Document of Support Resource  Each group will produce a one page document that lists the various places of support and when and why they can be useful to someone  Use the information you documented from your group’s research  The poster, pamphlet or document should be clean and error free…Take the time to check for spelling and plan out the layout before you start creating the actual document.  Make sure all group members names are on the document

Task Four: Role Play  Each group will also produce one role-play that demonstrates a person in need of support and the steps involved in obtaining an effective result.  Choose one location of support from your groups research as your setting.  Create a scenario involving someone needing to access that support.  Have all group members play a role in the scenario.  The scenario should be realistic, the problem should be believable, and the supports should reflect what your research has established will happen.  Do not over dramatize the problem, and do not oversimplify the response of supports.  Practice, rehearse and make sure all group members know what they are going to say and when they are going to say it…you can use notecards to help with remembering dialogue.

Task Five: Presentations and Critique of Role-Plays  The class will watch each role play and critique the effectiveness of the support in respect to the size of the problem or issue  Each group will perform their role-play and present their document to the entire class.  Once the group is finished, the class will discuss how well each support role-play demonstrated a practical situation and solution.  The goal of this exercise/task, is not to criticize anyone on their performance, but to assess the overall effectiveness of the supports…If students cant connect to the supports, its very unlikely they will attempt to use them in the future.

Evaluation: council  What did you learn form the role-play you participated in? How can you apply what you learned to your current academic or personal situation?  What did you learn by watching a different groups’ presentation or role-play?  What is one thing you feel your group could have improved upon?  What could you have done differently to help your group better accomplish its goal?

Vocabulary: